This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race - Part Three
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Sam, Dean, John, Bobby, YED, various Special Children
Disclaimer: Supernatural is not mine.
Warnings: kidnapping, emotional and physical trauma, profanity, twisting of canonical events, very little happy parts, minor character death
THREE
"Dean, read the map. What's the next one?"
Dean leaned forward in his seat and opened the glove compartment in the Impala's dash. He rummaged blindly around the assortment of fake IDs and drive-through wrappers before he found the folded map that John had put in there that morning just before they had left from Bobby's. He opened it out across his lap, running his index finger slowly along the marked roads and penciled-in circles that showed the towns they had yet to check out.
"Well, we just left Bear River, right? And there was nothing there. Benton was west; nothing there either. So we should be coming up on ... South Pass City now."
"There's another of Colt's churches there?"
"Yep," said Dean, folding the map up again and tossing it at his feet. "You think we'll find anything this time?"
John grunted wordlessly and Dean slumped back in his seat. Ever since Bobby had told them what Ash found before he died - that the small ghost towns of Southern Wyoming were filling up with demons - Dean had silently wondered if it wouldn't just be better to leave whatever was going down this time alone for once. It was something big - that much was obvious. And while usually he'd be jumping at the chance to shoot up some black-eyed sons of bitches, this time a rock had settled deep into his stomach at the thought. Something was wrong about this whole thing and Dean couldn't shake the feeling that whatever it was, it would only spell more trouble for them than they had any room to deal with right now.
His dad and Bobby, on the other hand, hadn't thought twice about it, packing up the cars with all the weapons and ammo the three of them could need and setting out before the sun was up. Even now, Dean could see the bent hood of Bobby's cap through the windshield of the rusted heap he was tailing them in.
John looked away from the road and glanced quickly at Dean, his lips turning down into a stiff, uncomfortable frown. "You okay?"
"Let's just get there."
John didn't push anymore - not that Dean expected him to; was relieved, in fact, when he did not - and soon enough they spotted another tiny huddle of decrepit and discarded shacks appearing on the horizon. As they reached the town limits, it was immediately clear that South Pass was just as forgotten as every other town around it. John stopped the car in the middle of its lone dirt road and Bobby pulled up beside them. They unloaded the trunk, strapping up, and just stood for a long moment looking around. Nothing greeted them.
"Well, if there're any demons here, doesn't look like they're coming out to play."
Bobby stared far away over Dean's shoulder, his eyes narrowed into slits. "Or maybe they've already found a game."
John and Dean followed his gaze. Across a large field that might have once held corn, or wheat, or some other farmer's labour but was now barren, was a single house on top of a hill. It wasn't far enough away that the three of them couldn't clearly hear the pain-filled screams and sounds of battle raging from within; or see electric lights flickering inside its curtained windows. They packed up again and drove as close as they dared, parking on a skinny gravel drive that led up to the dark front door.
"Dean, I want you to stay back. If they're in there, they'll try to run. Sweep up any that get through."
"What? Dad, no -"
"That's an order, Dean!" John barked, impatiently. He flipped the safety off his sawed-off. "Bobby and I'll go in there, but I need you out here. We don't leave any of them breathing long enough to hurt somebody." He walked away and Bobby shrugged his shoulder at Dean apologetically before he followed.
Dean leaned back on the hood of the car, crossing his ankles and shoving his fists in his jacket pockets angrily. He didn't like staying behind when he couldn't tell what was waiting up ahead. He could still watch his father and Bobby as they approached the house though and he drew his own gun, clicking the safety off, as he let it hang by his side.
Just in case.
-
Andy swung the front door open, and froze.
He remained where he was until the others started to poke their heads around his body to see what was going on, and then he took first one, then two quick steps back, muscles tensing, his hands clenching into a defensive stance.
The two men holding guns on the other side of the door seemed just as surprised.
There was a long moment of stunned silence and then: "I didn't think demons were in the habit of possessin' kids," the taller one said in a gruff voice to his companion.
"They're not," the other replied, "but I'm not in the habit of just assuming neither." He had a graying beard and a frayed baseball cap on his head. "Christo." When nothing happened, he drew out of his pocket a silver flask and splashed what looked like water on Andy's face. Andy spluttered and shook his dripping hair while the two men looked at each other silently. "You're not demons." It wasn't a question.
"Dem - Jesus! Of course we're not demons!" Andy cried, wiping his face on his sleeve.
"Bobby. The knife."
The shorter, hat-wearing man - Bobby pulled a small pointed dagger from his belt. Andy backed up even more, his face screwed up in fear and shock. "W-Whoa! Hey now - ouch!" A thin trail of blood escaped from between Andy's fingers where he held them over his sliced arm incredulously. "What the hell!" The taller man drew out a similar flask to Bobby's and proceeded to splash the rest of them with water, and Sam spit his share out of his mouth in disgust.
"Was that Holy Water?" Ava shrieked behind him. "Are you guys hunters?"
"John," Bobby said as his eyes widened. "I think they really are just kids."
"That's impossible."
"Listen, if you don't mind," Ansem spat, pushing ahead, "We've been here for a really long time and we'd all like to leave now. We don't have time to deal with any of ... your kind." The hunters followed his stare to where Sam was standing surrounded by the others. He could tell the moment that their gazes fell upon Lily because they both inhaled sharply and the one named John swore. "We've got other things to do."
They started to move past the hunters, keeping lots of space between them. Andy, Ansem, Jake, Max and Scott fell back so that they stood in between Sam and his precious cargo, and the men. Then they were outside, and of all the times Sam had imagined in the constant night of their basement what it would feel like to see the sun, he had never realized that anything could be so bright. He tried to raise a hand to shield his eyes, but had to settle for squinting them instead.
"Hang on," said Bobby, running down the steps after them. He had finally lowered his gun. "What d'you mean you've been here a long time? Do you kids live here? Where are your parents?"
"That's none of your business," Jake said.
"And you know what we are? You know about demons, and hunters?"
Sam's brothers and sisters looked at each other with a mixture of confusion and incredulous disbelief. Jake threw his head back, laughing loudly. "Who doesn't?" Then he looked at Ansem more seriously. "He could be back at any time."
Sam could hear the two hunters whispering furiously to each other behind their backs and followed faster behind his siblings, eager to put more distance between himself and the men. Halfway down the drive, they walked by another, younger man leaning against a huge black metal contraption on wheels who stared at them curiously as they passed.
They finally stopped in a clearing in the woods to the right of the house. Sam had never believed that trees could be so tall either.
"You can't carry her forever, Sam," Andy said, placing a light hand on his shoulder, and that's when he realized that he'd been gripping Lily a little too tightly in his arms. He set her down on the soft grass and helped the other boys in collecting sticks and twigs from around them as the girls wrapped her in the few ragged jackets they had.
"Go for it, Kelly," he whispered when it was done, and Kelly closed her eyes. At once, the brush beneath Lily's feet erupted into gentle flames that traveled up the rest of her body and consumed her. Ava suddenly burst into renewed sobs and grabbed a hold of Sam's hand. The heat was ferocious as it seemed to melt the very skin from his bones. The flames rose as tall as his head. Nobody's eyes were dry.
-
Let them bury their dead, John.
That's what Bobby had said; insisted on really; even when everything inside of John was screaming at him to do just the opposite.
These strange children had lived here, had spent their whole childhoods in abandoned Frontierland with minimal to no contact with the outside world, and that was only what they had found out in the brief few minutes since they'd found them. And, oh yeah ... they knew about demons. There was just no way that John was going to let that one go.
He sat in the passenger seat of the Impala as he mulled it all over in his head. Bobby was checking on the perimeter a final time, even though the first kid - the one who'd opened the door - said all the demons had left long ago. Through the outer edge of the forest, he could just see them as they stood around their Hunter's Pyre, the dead girl lain on top and the thin smoke curling over them all like a shroud.
Let them bury their dead.Yeah. Right. John didn’t care who these kids were, they had to be questioned. He had to find out exactly how much they knew about the omens surrounding their little party pad and why they were all in that house in the first place where demons were known to frequent. Why were they in this town at all? No supervision, no adults in sight; and the look that all of them shared...
Beside him, Dean was tapping out another rhythm on the steering wheel. The smoke from the fire was still going strongly and John couldn’t see Bobby at the moment. He closed his eyes, thinking he would only rest them for a minute -
"Hello, John."
His eyes snapped open. Sitting in the backseat, unnatural yellow orbs gleaming at him in the dark, was a man. He was smiling at John, and John glanced urgently over at Dean, still drumming on the wheel -
"You're dreaming, John. Dean doesn't know I'm here."
Panic bloomed. "Dean!" he called loudly. "DEAN!"
"Really, John, I'm offended. Do you not trust me?"
"Who are you?"
"I've been many names ... many, many faces."
John straightened, his defences on high alert. "You're a demon. What are you? What is this?"
The man - thing - shrugged condescendingly. "What I am is not important." He leaned forwards so his hand rested upon Dean's leather-clad shoulder; John's son didn't even flinch. "As for what this is ... I've got a story to share, John, and I want to tell it to you. Would you like to hear it?"
"And if I don't?"
"Well." The demon's face tilted. He seemed honestly disappointed that John would be anything besides glad to hear whatever lies it wanted to weave. "In that case, young Dean may find himself going in the same way as his brother, and that would be a shame. Poor S-"
Before he knew it, John had lunged over the seat and wrapped his hands around the demon's throat. "Don't say his name! How do you know about him? Don't you dare say his name!" he yelled. The demon just kept on smiling, and John whispered as he put the pieces together, "You killed him."
"I assure you I did no such thing," it replied. "But my story does involve him. Let's start at the beginning, shall we?" He paused, as if waiting for an invitation; John's eyes narrowed and the demon grinned brightly. "The date was November 2, 1983, and it was almost midnight when pretty Mary Winchester awoke to the cries of her baby through the monitor," he began, as if John's nightmares were a picture book he was sharing with the class. "She thought that the dark shape in her youngest son's nursery was her husband, John, there to quiet the little lad, sing a lullaby mayhap. But the man was not John." The demon grinned even wider. "It was me."
The beginning of a black horror was grasping at John's chest, strangling. "What did you do?"
"Oh ... a little of this, a little of that. I would have let Mary live had she not discovered who I was, had she not ... interrupted. But she recognized me, and I couldn't let her go after that, now could I?"
"You started the fire. You killed them."
"Correction: I killed one of them. Don't you read the papers? There was only one dead body in that room once the cops got there and I think you know which one it is I'm talking about."
"No ... no." He shook his head back and forth.
"Yes," the demon said. "None of the babies' bodies were ever found, were they? Because I didn't just kill them, John. I know the thought's crossed your mind; it would be hard for it not to, I'm sure. All of those tragic fires in the kiddies' nurseries on their six month birthdays; all those babies missing, their momma flambéed on the ceiling." He leaned towards John until their noses almost touched and John could feel the warm exhale of the bastard's breath on his skin, like sulfur and ash. "But do you know which of them is yours? Do you know which one is your Sammy?"
The yellow-eyed demon disappeared and John jerked awake. In the stream of nopleasegodno's rushing through his head, he flung the door to the Impala open and just managed to save himself from falling out before he was racing towards the tree line. It was another minute before he heard Dean and Bobby abandoning their posts to chase after him.
He didn't care. Only one intelligible word was making its way from his mind to his mouth, a taboo he hadn't let himself say, let alone think, for almost eighteen years and which instantly made his heart clench: "Sam!"
At his back, his oldest son bellowed at him, but the reminder only made John run faster towards his youngest, determined to have him in his reach.
"SAMMY!" he screamed again. "SAM! SAMMY!"
He was almost to the edge of the trees when he suddenly stopped, his upper body pulling forwards as his feet grounded, and he could not go any further. He stared across the field at the teenagers around their fire. One boy, the tall one who'd been carrying the dead girl, had the others gathered around him and seemed to be comforting them. Dean and Bobby pulled up behind him and John yelled until he felt his lungs might burst: "Sam!"
The tall boy turned, a pair of cold hazel eyes meeting John's across the distance, and fled.
"No!"
John started running again; but the kid was speedy, John would give him that. He darted between the trees like a jungle cat, leaping over rotten logs and rocks. His friends, the other kids, remained at the pyre, watching anxiously. But John noticed that none of them made a move to escape like Sam. He gained on the teenager slowly until he was just on his tail, and then he leaped and tackled him to the ground, pinning him in a wrestler's hold even as Dean wrapped around him from behind and tried to pull him away.
"Sam. It's Sam. It's Sammy. It's Sam."
He was crying now; Dean was holding him up. Bobby held a struggling Sam to the ground. There was nothing but fury and fear in his baby boy's eyes.
"The Impala, Dean, now. The two of 'em," Bobby growled.
Dean dragged him away, but John only had eyes for one.
-
The boy woke up just as Dean was pulling the car into the nearest motel's parking lot. The kid had hit his head pretty good when his - no, their - dad had tackled him on the grass, and his eyes were blurry and scared as they came in and out of focus in the backseat.
"Why are you doing this?"
Dean found that he couldn't stop staring at the boy in the rear view mirror. At first, when his dad had gone off, yelling his dead little brother's name, Dean had thought that John's precariously held sanity had finally cracked; and when he had refused to stop believing that this stick-thin waif with his too long hair and mysterious existence was Sammy, well, then Dean had been mad. Now, he figured he was just numb.
"What is this? How are we moving?"
Did he mean the car? Had he never ridden in a car before? Dean supposed it wasn't impossible however crazy it sounded; the kid had grown up in a basement after all, who knew how much he didn't know. John didn't say anything from the other seat but his jaw tightened visibly.
Bobby booked a double room for them for the night and left, retreating into his own room across the hall with the strict orders to call him later with updates and grumbling something about giving the three of them some 'bonding time', as John and Dean half-dragged the kid onto a bed where he could finally pass out. John sat down immediately upon the opposite bed, one large rough hand covering his face and the other hovering, as if it couldn't decide whether it was safe to touch his long lost son or if the boy was a ghost and any gesture on his part would cause him to disappear, again.
"It's really him?" asked Dean, hovering back by the door.
He watched his dad force the minimum amount of his attention back upon Dean; compose himself. "The demon wouldn't lie, not about this. I've been on its trail for too many years; it knows me, my weaknesses. And it knows the truth will mess with me far more than a lie. Besides, I can see ... in him ..."
"What?"
John looked thoughtfully at Sam before suddenly getting up. "Mary. And me."
Dean watched him pull over the old desk chair so that he was sitting closer to the bed, where the kid - his brother, and boy, didn't it feel weird thinking that again - was tossing and whimpering in the throes of what must be one hell of a nightmare. In the dim light of the room, he looked so young and innocent, like an infant, somebody that Dean could swaddle in a blanket and promise something he knew, even as he said it, he could never keep; like Dean could keep him safe as the heat of the fire seared at his child-sized body's back. Even if Dean hadn't while it'd still mattered.
"What about Mommy and Sam?"
And in his dreams, he was that four-year-old again - scared, confused, the only he carried out of the wreckage with him his daddy's words.
"Don't worry, Dean, I'll get them, just run as fast as you can. I'll get them; I'll get your brother. Go, Dean, now!"
A minute, an house, an eternity (did it even matter?) later, John had emerged, covered in soot and tears, but alive, and alone.
Later, it would come back to Dean as the last promise his father ever told him which Dean actually expected to be kept.
-
"This is a bad idea," Dean muttered some time later. "We should let him sleep." John was already sitting slumped forwards in a corner of the room, elbows resting on jean-clad knees, chin in one calloused palm. Dean watched him over his shoulder as he leaned over the prone figure curled in the bed, but the only answer he received was a frown and a tilt of the head which clearly said, Go on.
His hands had hardly grazed the shoulder for a second before said shoulder was being jerked away and cold, hazel eyes were staring up at him, completely awake. The boy started backing away from Dean's still outstretched hand, gaze flickering between Dean and John and the door, and Dean read the rising panic in that gaze as clear as if it'd been said aloud.
"Hey," he spluttered quickly. "Hey, kid, it's alright, you're alright, calm down." He lifted his palm to show he meant no harm before carefully backing up a step. "We just want to talk." John had remained silent from his position behind him so Dean started with the simplest of questions first: "What's your name?"
Sam's eyes narrowed suspiciously, but his voice was strong and sure when he finally spoke. "I'm pretty sure you already know."
And, yeah, Dad was right - there was definitely a bit of John in the kid.
"Maybe I do," Dean agreed. This was good, right? Talking was good. He just had to keep the kid talking; he could do that. "But right now we're more interested in what you know. So come on, man, lay it on me."
He was silent for a long time, his expression hardening even further, and Dean could feel the dread creeping up inside himself like a fog. "Lay it on ...?" Sam finally asked, then he shook his head. "It's Sam," he answered. "My name is Sam."
"And you ... know who we are?" he asked.
Sam nodded. And, well, shit. Dean glanced back at John but his dad seemed to be stunned into permanent silence. "I don't know what the demons told you, but we're not here to hurt you," he said, turning back.
The kid huffed disbelievingly. He was gaining confidence the longer Dean spoke and the coldness in his eyes broke through into a frightening, unrestrained anger. "Yeah, right, and I'm a fluffy pink pony. You're hunters!"
"Hey, we're not the Addams."
"Yeah ..." he spoke slowly, "whatever that means. Please, just let me go."
Dean hadn't even seen him get up, but suddenly John was standing behind him, and the angry puffs of his breath seemed to match those of his son's perfectly. Sam flinched away, pressing as far as he could against the headboard on the far side of the bed. Dean sent up a silent prayer for John to just let Dean handle this, but it seemed any hope that Dean might have had for avoiding a fight were destined not to be answered.
"So you can just run off back to him?!" John stepped around Dean. The emotion behind the words was hidden well, only vocalized by the faint tremor as he spoke and the steep hunch of his shoulders as he stood. "You that desperate to get back to him? To the monster that kidnapped you, took you away from your family!" One of John's fists gripped the front of the boy's shirt, dragging him up, even as the other pressed gently against the boy's cheek. "He took you away but it's us you're afraid of? He's the one you should hate!"
Dean watched with increasing anxiety as Sam's entire posture stiffened and he tried to pull away from John's grip; but the older man responded by holding on only that much tighter. "Hate him?" he spat furiously. "He saved me! But you - you and the rest of your kind - you kill things! You act all tough and cool, as if you not already broken inside; and the only way that you can feel better about yourself is by hurting creatures that are just trying to survive. You call the man who raised me a monster - so tell me, what does that make you? Why shouldn't I hate you?"
And that was far enough, Dean decided. John looked about ready to resort to blows and was only barely holding himself back. Sam was trembling and trying to pull away from John's iron-clad grasp with increasing amounts of success. Dean grabbed a hold of his father's arm and forcefully tore them apart, gripping John's forearms and screaming in his face as he moved them both backwards away from Sam. "Enough! Dad, that's enough! Why don't you just leave? Go, get some air!"
"Out of my way, Dean!" He tried to pry Dean off, but Dean tightened his grip and refused to let go.
"Just leave! Go ... go help Bobby with the books."
"I'm not going to waste my time with useless research when -"
"Dad, just go!" He opened the motel room door leading to the hallway and pushed John out, before slamming it shut in his face. He could hear his father banging his fist to be let back in but Dean ignored him in favour of turning back to his brother. "Sam."
Sam's voice and face were blank when he asked, "Is he always like that?"
"Sammy," Dean whispered. When the boy just kept staring past him to the peeling green paint of the door, he sighed. "Yeah, pretty much."
Sam snorted, and one side of his mouth twitched up in an expression eerily reminiscent of John Winchester. "Figures."
"He's just ..." Dean tried, but this time it was Sam's turn to sigh as he moved slowly around the bed.
"No, just stop, Dean. It is Dean, right?" Dean nodded and Sam walked past Dean as he wandered slowly into the attached kitchenette, where he began to pick up objects seemingly at random as they caught his attention one by one. "Look, Dean. I spent a long period of my life in that house, and it may not have been ideal, but it was my life. And those demons ... they were there the entire time, too. They kept me; they raised me; they're who made sure that I had food and shelter and something to wear. And they did the same with the twenty other kids in my exact same position. I've spent my entire life knowing all about you and him," he nodded in the direction John had gone, "and living it without you. So don't make the mistake of believing that I need you now.
"Oh, and another thing," he looked over his shoulder at Dean. "It's Sam."
"Okay," Dean nodded woodenly, "Yeah, okay, Sam."
A tiny smile broke across Dean's little brother's face, a very small smile, and strained; but the gesture made Dean want to pump his fist into the air with joy. He held back, though, afraid that any recognition on his part would just serve to push Sam away.
Sam suddenly paused in front of the long tiled counter he was examining. "What is this?" he asked, pointing first to the toaster, then to the mini-fridge, the microwave, and the coffeemaker. "What's that ... and that? What's it called? I don't recognize any of these things." He spun around to face Dean, his brow puckering low over his face. For the moment, it seemed that his confusion outweighed his overwhelming fright. "And that thing that we arrived in earlier ... that black box ...? Dean, what the hell is all of this?"
"Whoa! Hey!" Dean stammered, the joy evaporating as suddenly as it had come. "Too many questions, dude. Hey, come over here." He pulled out two chairs from the small kitchen table and sat down in one as he motioned for Sam to do the same. "I've got a better idea."
-
"So," said Sam a moment later, frowning at Dean suspiciously across the table, "How does this work exactly?"
"Well, it's simple. First you ask me a question and I answer, then I get to ask you a question and you have to answer. But you have to answer it with the truth."
"Sounds fair, I guess," he answered, crossing his arms. "Okay," he thought quietly for a long moment, "here's what I wanta know - how the hell did we get here, y'know, from the house?"
"It's called a car, dude," said Dean. "Specifically, a '67 Impala, and she's just about the sweetest ride on the planet. I can't believe you don't know this. What've you done all your life?"
"Train," said Sam, like it should be obvious, "Fight."
Dean frowned. The kid's naivety really wasn't as funny as it should be. "Sounds like a pretty dull life."
Sam shrugged. Then he grimaced, rubbing his hands over his furrowed temples as if they pained him. "Nah, it wasn't all bad."
"Then why'd you leave? It couldn't have been 'cause you loved it there, with your ... caretakers. Demons," Dean scoffed at the idea of anybody finding something to love in a demon. "You couldn't have loved the demons, they don't know how to love! Evil, lying -"
The realization of sudden silence on the other side of the door still Dean's rant and he paused to listen. Out in the hall, quiet footsteps were walking in the direction of Bobby's room. He watched Sam's face carefully, seeing the anger lingering in there. "He'll be back soon," Dean warned. "And then he's gonna want to know all the answers to these questions for himself."
Sam rolled his eyes disdainfully. "Great." Sam looked at the door as well, and Dean could have sworn ... or maybe it was only the physical representation of Dean's own dread, that there was a new darkness in the kid's eyes, a shadow. Of doubt about how he'd been raised? Maybe. Or maybe it was just the manifestation of what Dean wanted to see.
Just as soon as it appeared, the darkness passed, and Sam turned his attention back onto Dean. "I never hated them ... not really," he said slowly. "None of us ever did. But it's true, what you said: you can't love a demon either. It's not human nature." His gaze drifted far away over Dean's shoulder. "But what does it matter now?" he sighed. "We didn't like it there, didn't like what it did to us. I just ... needed to know what else was out there."
"I think I can understand that," Dean replied. He swallowed. His mouth was suddenly very dry.
"I don't even know why I'm telling you this." Sam huffed, annoyed. "But now I've answered two of your questions, so it's my turn. Why did the yellow eyed demon keep me, Dean? What did and Mary and John Winchester do so that he would choose me out of everybody?" He rubbed at his temples again. "God, my head!" Dean was pretty sure he hadn't been meant to hear that part.
It had been quite warm in the room, but at Sam's outburst, it felt like a vacuum had sucked away all of the heat. "Choose you for what?" he asked.
"To fight the war!" Come on, he's got to know something!" Sam demanded, pointing at the closed door through which John had gone. "And he must have told you what that is! I know what I'm supposed to do, but it didn't have to be me. Dean, why is it me?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about. Sam, what does he want you to do?"
"Nothing that nobody else could have done," Sam snorted. "He calls me his general, like the army. And when the rest of his army is ready, he's gonna give me a gun." He shook his head as he paced back and forth beside the table. "I really shouldn't be telling you this. When they're ready ... when the army is ready, I'm supposed to free them, and when they're free ... I'm going to lead the demons that will bring you hunters down."
-
Sam shivered silently as he lay beneath the pile of thin, moth hole-ridden blankets. He could hear the Winchesters sleeping on the bed beside his, but Sam was far from being tired. Thoughts kept swirling through his head, the memory of the - for lack of a better word - conversation that he'd had with John after the talk with Dean surfacing and pounding in time with the headache torturing his skull. John had questioned him relentlessly, going over and over the few tidbits that Sam had already spilled to Dean, until Sam couldn't separate what was real and what was from his own nightmares anymore.
"Now would you like to repeat all that?"
Sam's hackles had raised at the voice ... the ever-there fear of a threat returning. Dean was innocent, he thought; Dean did not really have anything to do with it; but John ...
He would be lying to himself if he said that he had been surprised to find his ... original family waiting for them when he'd escaped the house with the other kids. He knew that they were hunters ... had been for practically forever ... But then his eyes had locked upon the old man's across the field; and something that the Boss had said a long time ago had entered his head. He had been maybe six or seven and it was during one of his first lessons to learn how to use and control his growing powers. The Boss had leaned down because Sam hadn't wanted to do whatever it was he was supposed to be doing that day, his head tilted until they were looking at each other straight on, and he had whispered: "If only your parents could see you now maybe they'd be sorry, Sammy, sorry for hating you. Maybe John and Mary could have loved you instead." And these words held exactly the effect the boss knew they would because afterwards, Sam had done his task unthinkingly, on spite alone.
"Would you like to repeat all that?"
Dean had made a move to step forward then but one look at John, towering over Sam, had stopped him.
"What war is the demon gearing up for? Do you all have powers? How many of you are there?"
And Sam had told them everything. He hadn't been able to stop himself. This entire mess was the hunters' fault ... the Winchesters' fault ... and if they couldn't even live up to their own mistakes ... Sam and his brothers and sisters were just trying to stop the Armageddon the hunters had started. He grinned beneath the covers; they had looked so surprised at that little revelation.
"Sam!"
Outside, the rain tapped a pitter-patter against the window pane and he closed his eyes, trying to block it out, but with every breath that passed, it only became harder and harder to ignore.
"Sam!"
With a jolt, he sprang up on the bed and turned towards the window. Ava's drenched face, her dark hair plastered to her forehead, blue eyes glinting, peered in at him out of the black night. Sam watched her, stunned, before he felt a wide smile spread across his face.
"Sam! Come on!"
He moved off the bed, lifted the latch, and opened the window as quietly as he could, fighting to push it up against the old rusty frame. He paused a second, but quiet snores still sounded from the other side of the motel room. Ava's hand reached into the opening, and Sam started to climb through. Suddenly, without warning, the light clicked on behind him; he turned around to find Dean standing in a pair of boxer shorts and a ratty grey t-shirt, eyes glaring daggers into the back of Sam's hand.
"Going somewhere?"
Sam froze. "He's coming with us," Ava declared before he could open his mouth, "where he belongs."
"No," said Dean fiercely. "He belongs with us, with his blood." He hadn't taken his eyes off of Sam. "Are you really that blind? It's all lies, Sam! You don't have to do this. Please, man, come on."
"Yes, I do," he said, disregarding the rest. He couldn't think about that now. "I'm sorry, Dean," and he was surprised to find that he actually sort of was, "I am. You're not so bad, y'know, for a hunter and all. But I can't stay here."
Dean's face fell. "I can't stop you, can I?"
Sam turned away. He thought that if Dean really wanted to, he could stop Sam no problem; but Dean was still standing there watching him resignedly. He hadn't even woken up his dad yet. Ava had not yet withdrawn her hand and Sam grabbed onto it tighter, letting her hoist him through to the other side and onto the rain-saturated ground which squelched loudly underneath his shoes when he touched down.
"Okay, man?" Andy whispered, clapping a warm hand to his shoulder. Beside him, Jake grinned.
He knew that if he turned back now, he would still see Dean staring at him through the window; the thought was surprisingly comforting. "I am now." Together they slipped between the cover of the rain and the trees, out of sight.
Part Four